11/17/2002

One of the very best things about Futurama is how visual it is. The opening sequence is probably one of the best in TV history, and the little details along the way remind me of early Simpsons, but with more color and even a little more imagination, helped along by the fact that it's a sci-fi cartoon.

Tonight they found the fossilized remains of the pizzeria where Fry used to work, along with his fossilized dog Seymour. The professor announced that he could extract Seymour's DNA and recreate him, and while Fry prepared (while kissing his fossilized dog), Bender got jealous. Bender was also working on his magic act, which led to tears that turned into balloons, then birds, and flowers popping out of his head. . .and then a spectacular laser show.

It all led to some throwing of Seymour into hot lava, and some rescuing, and then right before the procedure was about to take place, Fry decided to stop it because the dog had lived for 15 more years after he himself disappeared, so he'd obviously moved on past Fry and didn't need him anymore. Then they showed this really sad flashback where we saw that Seymour found Fry in his suspended animation chamber, tried to drag Fry's family there, and waited patiently outside the pizzeria for Fry for the rest of his life. It was sad!

Sadder than balloon tears.

11/10/2002

A new episode of Futurama aired tonight, can you believe it?

They didn't pre-empt it with a football game or a Nascar race. They didn't start it halfway through. They just aired it. In full. At 7:00. It was lovely.

Global warming made the earth so hot that Al Gore's head -- "the inventor of the environment" -- held a big meeting to see who could solve the problem. Turns out that all the robots' emissions were causing the problem, so Richard Nixon's head lured ALL the robots to the Galapagos Islands for a party, really planning to destroy them all. Professor Farnsworth came up with a solution at the last minute, requiring the robots to expel all their emissions at once to push the earth farther away from the sun.

Highlights included:
1. Zoidberg:"I'm steaming inside my own shell."
2. A melting Morbo the newscaster with his head shrivelling, describing the terrible situation with "Morbo is pleased but sticky."
3. Bender in a speedo.
4. Bender's turtle friend...Shelly.
5. The description of how global warming started, with evil greenhouse gases attacking a happy sunbeam, then beating it up, then attacking more & more sunbeams until there was nothing but "sunbeams' rotting corpses".
6. Richard Nixon's head yelling at Spiro Agnew's headless body.

4/7/2002

This was a sports one, and I was bored. Blernsball is no more interesting than baseball. Boo.

2/10/2002

I was looking online for some pictures for this review and found that several sites are announcing that Futurama has been cancelled! Fox is saying it hasn't been cancelled, but that they haven't ordered any new episodes (and have more than a dozen in the can). The company that employs all the animators who create the show, however, had to let them all go when Fox stopped putting in orders for more. Apparently, according to Fox, that is NOT a cancellation. Hmph. You know, Futurama isn't brilliant yet, but it's much more entertaining than The Simpsons these days AND I don't see how anyone at Fox can expect it to be a hit when it's only on a few times a year. Honestly, they pre-empt it more often than they air it.

And tonight's show was funny. Leela got an "orphan of the year" award from the Orphanarium where she grew up and Bender got a job disposing of toxic waste. He started pouring it into the sewers until the sewer mutants got mad and captured Bender, Fry, and Leela. Two hooded figures helped them escape but Leela stayed to investigate after finding a room decorated with clippings of her life. Turns out the hooded people were her parents and she was a mutant, not an alien. They sent her to live above ground as an alien so she could have a normal life. No specifically brilliant bits of dialogue to report, but I love that the Professor invented a huge machine to make glow-in-the-dark noses, and that's how Bender got into the toxic waste business.

01/06/2002

This was a good one. The Professor invented a What If Machine that showed alternative lifetimes. Bender got to find out what life would have been like if he became human. One of the first things he decided he loved doing was vomiting. ("It's just like Mardi Gras!" said Dr. Zoidberg.) Bender went on such a Bender that he turned into this massively fat monster who stored food in his fat folds. And then he died. Fry found out what life would be like if it was just like video games, since he's good at them. They got attacked by space invaders ("drop down, speed up, and reverse course!"), and were aided by General Pacman, who made that whackawhacka pacman sound whenever he moved. The last one was about Leela in Oz, but I missed the first few seconds to see what her "what if" was. The highlight of that is when Zoidberg, as the Coward, asked for courage and was told "You don't need courage if you have. . .a gun!"

12/23/2001

They resurrected evil robotic Santa for another Christmas special but it was painfully lame. Oh well.

12/9/2001 -- SEASON PREMIERE

I've missed this show. And I'd forgotten just how good it looks.

They travelled back in time by accident (Fry tried making Jiffypop in the microwave at the same time as a nearby supernova), and landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Zoidberg got captured by the army, Fry accidentally killed his own grandfather in an overzealous attempt to keep him from dying and then slept with his grandmother, and Bender smashed into bits. It was fun.

 5/13/2001

It started off with Professor Farnsworth's fabulous description of the 20th Century as "the time when scientists cracked the human genome and boy bands roamed the earth." (It's Jenny's World, you know. Really it is. I'm just hiding in my little corner of it until the boy bands go away.) And then they all followed Fry around as he explored the world of the next century, and that's what led to his joyful discovery that you actually could date any celebrity you wanted, thanks to a company called Nappster. Fry downloaded Lucy Liu into a robot and they hung around making out all the time. Turned out that Nappster had been keeping her disembodied head prisoner and copying her illegally. Which hurt like hell, apparently. Fry, Leela, and Bender rescued her only to confront a whole slew of evil Lucy Lius marching towards them. The only odd part was that they kept referring to "all her movies" as if she has a diverse body of work. Hasn't she only done, you know, Charlie's Angels and Ally McStool? Other than that, it was damned funny.

Oh yeah: they also had an eBay auction where the Milky Way galaxy was sold to "the Being of Unimaginable Horror". He was all slimy and monstrous. But still not as funny as hearing the terrified cry: "It's an army of Lucy Lius!"

 5/6/2001

Who knew the Harlem Globetrotters had a homeworld? Yay for Futurama, this week's show was actually funny. It's obvious that the writers watch a lot of Star Trek, they had far too much fun with the time jump story. (Watching Star Trek is a good thing, if you're not sure.) It was cool that one of the Harlem Globetrotters doubled as an expert in "chronological wang dang doodle".

The Britney parody was nice too, as was Marv Albert's head. And I liked Fry's pronouncement about hypnotists: "Hypnosis is for losers with big weird eyebrows."